How Do I Get Rid Of Commercials Before Videos?

Posted By
cynthia
On
April 29, 2013 @ 8:36 AM
In
Using The Internet |
1 Comment

Question: How do I get rid of the commercials that play before I watch a video online? – Thomas

Well, the simple answer is that you can’t. Those commercials are called pre-rolls (because they run before the videos you wish to see) and they are how websites pay their bills. It takes a lot of technical expertise and effort to maintain a site capable of playing videos and they have to pay for it somehow. The choices are to charge users subscription or membership fees or to cover those costs by selling advertising.

Some pre-rolls will allow you to skip watching the commercial after a few seconds, others make you watch them in their entirety. Sometimes you can skip a pre-roll by hitting refresh on your browser (or using the F5 key), but that doesn’t always work. You could just end up starting another commercial from the beginning.

Pre-rolls are an important source of revenue for many of the sites you enjoy watching. Most local news operations couldn’t afford to have websites without the income generated by pre-rolls. Some sites try to schedule pre-rolls to only come every few video plays, while others take every opportunity to squeeze in as many video plays as they can generate.Fortunately, most pre-rolls are short, usually around 15 seconds.

When watching longer programs, you will sometimes see commercial breaks. Like pre-rolls, you usually cannot skip these ads. However, the breaks are usually much shorter than the commercial breaks for television programming. Where you might get four or five minutes of commercials in a single break during a television program, you will seldom see more than a minute at a time playing a video on the web.

Some videos also have what are called post-rolls , which are commercials that run after you watch the video. Just like commercials on radio and television and ads in magazines and newspapers, these spots are how companies pay their bills. In effect, you are being charged a little bit of your time instead of your money to watch the videos.